Looking through the lens of Bourdieu: A corpus-based Study of English Romance Fiction Translation

Habitus is one of the key concepts of the Bourdieusian sociology which Translation Studies has benefited. Based on the Bourdieusian sociological model, this study investigated the translatorial habitus of the Iranian translators of English romance novels as far as the translation strategies of culture-specific items (CSIs) are concerned before and after the Cultural Revolution of 1980 in Iran. The research data include 4282 sentences containing CSIs extracted from Rebecca, Sense and Sensibility, and The Great Gatsby, and their two Persian translations. The extracted data were analyzed, adopting a consolidated typology of translation procedures for CSIs. The strategies employed for translating CSIs are presented with frequencies and percentages using descriptive statistics. Moreover, the results were corroborated with a qualitative analysis of some archived interviews printed in Motarjem [the translator] journal. The investigation revealed three essential findings: a marked source-oriented tendency among Iranian translators of the English romance novels when translating CSIs in the Pre-Cultural Revolution era, maintaining the same tendency in the Post-Cultural Revolution era, and finally a growing tendency in moving from Pre- to Post-Cultural Revolution era. The results of the Chi-square test highlighted a significant difference between various strategies used in two eras.

“Misty Poetry” as a reflection of the nature of Chinese literature of the “New Period” (second half of the 20th century)

The subject of the study is the formation of “Misty Poetry” trend in Chinese literature of the late 20th century. The study aims at the disclosure of the dynamics of “Misty Poetry” within modernist paradigm against the backdrop of Chinese literature of the “New Period”. The method is grounded in identification of key modernist poetics categories, perceived and transformed in the versification practice of Misty Poetry. Sociocultural contextualization method is employed to locate Misty Poetry in the post Cultural Revolution aesthetic and ideological context of China. The study results cover the lyrical attempt at a modernistic search for identity in Chinese literature of the “New Period”. The pursuit of self and vaster category of identity is considered and comprehensively analyzed through the array of representative poetic texts (Zhang Ming, Meng Lang, Bei Dao, Duo Duo). “Misty Poetry” marked the beginning of the “New Period” in the history of modern Chinese literature. The trend demonstrated qualitative changes in the ideological foundations and artistic practice of the new poetry of China in the 20th century. “Misty Poetry” became a kind of aesthetic protest against the ideological and artistic clichés of the preceding cultural-historical era. The concept of “self” within the paradigm of Misty Poetry is corroborated to be perceived as an independent consciousness, not dictated by any ideology or doctrine, disclosed through the means of a poet’s internal thoughts depictions, both conscious and subconscious. The paper results demonstrate the transformative potential of the Misty Poetry trend poetics on prosodic level, level of stylistic imagery and genre specificity. The paper interpretative results explore the significance of the “Misty Poetry” in the way that it revived and gave a new impetus to the further development to the humanistic orientation of Chinese poetry. The novelty is connected with the aesthetic means of territorializing the marginal space that provides the poet and the poetic protagonist with a critical distance from the dominant discourse of the political-cultural establishment of post Cultural Revolution China are disclosed. The paper concludes the Misty Poetry trend drew attention to the subjective beginning in art and opened the discourse for an active search for a new artistic reality in which the legacy of classical poetry of China, the best humanistic traditions of the new poetry of the early 20th century and the modernist features of Western poetry were combined.

Translation, transformation and refiguration: The significance of Jingdezhen and the materiality of porcelain in the work of two contemporary Chinese artists1

In December 2016 a group of researchers led by Professor Jiang Jiehong travelled to Jingdezhen as fieldwork for the Everyday Legend research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Representing the White Rabbit Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art, Australia, I was invited to participate. This article developed from reflections on the fieldwork component of the research project, as well as the formal and informal discussions that took place, at the time and subsequently, in Shanghai, Birmingham, Groningen and London. In 2018, as a further development of this process of reflection, I conducted semi-structured interviews with two artists of different generations: the article examines how Liu Jianhua and Geng Xue approach the use of porcelain as a contemporary art material. Each has spent extensive periods of time in Jingdezhen and each is immersed in this particularly Chinese tradition. At the same time, each is identified (and identifies themselves) as practising in a global contemporary art context and participates in exhibitions and exchanges internationally. Considered in the context of current and historical discourses around global contemporaneity2 and its manifestations in twenty-first-century China, their work illuminates the key question that the Everyday Legend project was designed to examine: how can contemporary art and traditional Chinese craft practices intersect, informing and enriching each other? As representatives, respectively, of the generation who emerged into the first years of the post-Cultural Revolution Reform and Opening period, and of a younger generation educated partly outside China, they reveal how Chinese artists strategically negotiate local and global in positioning their work as contemporary reinventions of traditional forms and materiality.

The Ocular Turn, Misty Poetry, and a Postrevolutionary Imagination

“The Answer,” a poem by Bei Dao first published in 1978, marks the emergence of a defiant voice in contemporary Chinese poetry and asserts skepticism as the political stance of a young generation in post–Cultural Revolution China. It also heralds a historic transition from an era of sonic agitation to an aesthetics based on visual perception and contemplation. This rereading of Bei Dao's canonical poem and other related texts goes back to the late 1970s, when the political implications of the human senses were firmly grasped and heatedly debated. The author shows that an ocular turn occurs in “The Answer” and drives the aesthetic as well as political pursuits of a new generation of poets. He further argues that, in a moment still enthralled with a revolutionary sonic culture, Misty poetry disavowed aural excitement and was part of the reconditioning of the human senses in preparation for a postrevolutionary order and sensibility.

Equ(al)ity and Community in China after Forty Years of Economic Reform

We suggest a methodology that combines a refined conceptual approach with a theoretically-inspired empirical assessment, to analyse how Sinicised Marxist theory as well as practice has invariably emphasised Marx’s philosophy of history, rather than any version of Marxist egalitarian political philosophy, and therefore developed a culturally distinctive version of Marxism as totalitarian and subsequently authoritarian (rather than democratic) socialism. We argue that Chinese socialism has appropriated and applied socialist ideals to China’s post-cultural-revolution development into an economic reform agenda without political transition. We suggest that China today runs an ethically and politically problematic regime under which the people enjoy neither sufficient social justice nor decent community values. Such lack of equality and community represents a major inherent contradiction of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which has to accept and even accommodate increasing inequality to drive future growth. This contradiction also makes the so-called Chinese Dream more one of national aggregate prosperity than a dream for the Chinese people.

Director Guang Chunlan in Conversation

This interview features Guang Chuanlan, a Sibe director who has been active since 1976. Guang is known for establishing Chinese Muslim cinema made in the Xinjiang autonomous region in socialist China. Many of her films are released and awarded in Arabic countries and in India. Her enduring career exemplifies the key role women filmmakers have played in building Chinese cinema under state-driven film policies. While it is commonly believed that the Fifth Generation (represented by male directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Tian Zhuangzhuang) put post–Cultural Revolution Chinese cinema on the international map, Guang's career (along with those of other women directors) compels us to reexamine Chinese film historiography and excavate a more complex constellation, especially with regard to women's authorship in intersection with race/ethnicity and the state, and inter-Asian film interactions based on a shared religion—a dimension oftentimes obscured by the dominant paradigm of East-West internationality.

The Making and Remaking of China’s “Red Classics"

This book brings together research on China’s “red classics” across the entire Maoist period through to their re-emergence in the reform era. It critically investigates the changing nature and significance of China’s “red classics” at each point of their (re/)emergence in three key areas: their socio-political and ideological import, their aesthetic significance and their function as a mass cultural phenomenon. The book is organised in two parts in chronological order covering the Maoist period and post-Cultural Revolution respectively, and includes a representative range of genres including novels, short stories, films, TV series, picture books (lianhuanhua), animation and traditional style paintings (guohua). The book illuminates important questions such as: What determined what could and could not become a “red classic”? How was the real revolutionary experience of authors shaped by the regime to create “red classic” works? How were traditional forms incorporated or transformed? How did authors and artist negotiate the treacherous waters of changing political demands? And how did the “red classics adapt to a new political environment and a new readership in new millennium China? While most of the chapters focus primarily on one of the two periods under consideration many also follow the fate of their subject through both periods, creating overall a highly coherent overview of the changing phenomenon of the “red classics” over the seventy-five years since the Yan’an Forum and in the process simultaneously tracing the changing dynamic between the CCP and these classic narratives of the communist revolution.